Author Archive: "Lidia Yuknavitch"

A fellow writer wants to know more about something I've written, something centering on a child's body at the center of the storm of war. She asks, "Why bring violence and sexuality so close to the body of a child?" Her eyes blur and magnify when she says it. I can hear the flutter of worry in her voice. We are both mothers. We have both lost children.

I take a long time answering.

Let me start over. We are in a bar. Two menopausal women writers. Our middle-age barnacles up around all the newly formed couples swimming in and out between booths and things like colorful fish. The teeming-with-life bar waters slide right through us. We could be somebody's mother.

I don't know what my writer friend is thinking, but I suspect it's something about protecting children. I suspect she's worried I've gone too far this time. It's a fact that her writing is exceptionally loving and giving. It's a fact that her books make people feel good. And we need that. A lot. I am grateful for her writing and giving. I often wish I could write something similar, just once. Believe me, I've tried. But my story always... breaches.

What I'm holding in my mouth besides the big gulp of wine is a sentence. Not sure whether to swallow it down or clear my throat and answer. I've been here before. The sentence I'm holding in my mouth is this: I wrote straight into violence, sexuality, art, and a child's body on purpose. Because it's a place I have been to.

But what kind of woman says that? What kind of mother?

I swallow.

She smiles, little lines stitching around her mouth.

Like the lines around my eyes.

We are made of our lines.

148 Beslan children massacred in Russia — over 30 terrorists assaulted the ceremony, capturing 1,128 people as hostages — everyone who failed to flee. Most of them were ushered into the school's gym. The gym was then mined.

I weigh how long it would take me to explain myself against my entire life — especially the parts that didn't go quite right — didn't plot out and climax and resolve or transcend. I think about my character arcs. The one in my life, bent and crooked and even blown to bits in places. The one in my book about a girl, how the arc doesn't do what the reader wishes it would. It's not like I accidentally missed something. I wrote a girl whose grace is violent and sexual. And that's her agency. She doesn't transcend anything. Her arc doesn't plot right. But her body still carries a story, like all of our bodies do.

I'm maybe a bad writer or a bad person or a bad mother or all of the above, is one conclusion.

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That word, "war," what do we mean when we say it? I mean I KNOW what we mean. We mean those epic historical markers of national crisis and conflicts of power. We mean streams of soldiers. But sometimes I wonder if war also braids its way into us like DNA. A bloodline. A habit of being. A structure of consciousness.

My mother's father molested his children.

My father's father beat him to a hunched-over animal in the kitchen. His mother cut his tongue. Literally.

My father abused my mother, my sister, me.

What words do we use for the suffering of children in their various war zones?

"Domestic violence." Brutality too close to the body of a child.

We don't tend to say "war" when it's the small backs of children, the tearing open of child-flesh.

And if we do, it's something along the lines of "child refugees" or "innocent victims of conflict," or "the effects of war on women and children." Effects. On that oddly conflated category, "women and children." But not the war itself. That agency, that language is reserved and awarded exclusively to the heroic combatants. The soldier's story.

The terror group Boko Haram shocked the world last year when its fighters kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from a boarding school in the town of Chibok, in Nigeria.

How many violences must a child suffer before they are awarded a purple heart?

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My middle-aged woman writer friend cares about me. She cares what happens to me, she cares about my writing career. While she is talking to me about this uneasy writing I have put into the world, she is speaking compassionately. Even the bar we are in is warm and caring. I could come to this bar any night of my life and the people in it would hold me — if by "hold" we mean keep a person from shattering in their aloneness.

My friend, she's worried things will be hard for me. People might not click "like" or swell with admiration when they read me. People might feel angry or turn away from some of the brutality I rendered. People on Goodreads or Amazon may get snarky. She's right, too; it will probably be hard.

But not as hard as things that are hard are.

We are both mothers, so we've both been ravaged by motherhood as well — a brutality of love I'm still not sure how any woman survives. You heard me right. Brutality. It's a love that could kill you.

The 43 Mexican students who disappeared in southern Mexico in September were abducted by police on order of a local mayor, and are believed to have been turned over to a gang that killed them and burned their bodies before throwing some remains in a river, the nation's attorney general said Friday.

I know this because I traveled to a place called grief and loss. It's a real place that people whose children have died travel to. Some of the grievers don't come back. Some come back with nothing but nothing in their guts, and live that way the rest of their lives, or go to dirt. I went down into the depths when my daughter died, I journeyed far enough to the bottom to see that I could let go in the dark blueblack. I stayed a little too long, I admit. The membrane between psychosis and imagination is thin as infant's skin. But I did not let go. And I did not return empty handed. What I brought back up with me is as world-shattering as the myths and stories we still use for life maps.

What I brought back up with me is the agency to make art. And more: I brought back with me the truth that sometimes beauty can come from dark and brutal places. In fact sometimes art rests exactly between brutal and beautiful, as is the case in the body of a dead child.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking, there is nothing beautiful about the body of a dead child. And you are right.

Except that I've held a dead infant, the one that was mine, and I tell you I learned more about the sublime beauty of things in that moment than I have ever learned in any other moment of my life.

Her eyelashes.

Her lips.

Her perfect cheeks and fingers.

First the Pakistani Taliban bombed or burned over 1,000 schools. Then they shot Malala Yousafzai, the teenage advocate for girls' rights. But on Tuesday, the Taliban took their war on education to a ruthless new low with an assault on a crowded school in Peshawar that killed 145 people — 132 of them uniformed schoolchildren — in the deadliest single attack in the group's history.

In this special series, we asked writers we admire to share a book they're giving to their friends and family this holiday season. Check back daily to see the books your favorite authors are gifting.

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Well, I had my sights set on an entirely different wonderful novel by a woman, and then Doris Lessing died.

Her broad face and transparent eyes. Her unruly hair. Her brilliant, unkempt mind that took language to the interstices between the socius, the sexual, the intellectual. Her deep understanding of why we have to reject the scripts life hands us as so-called "women." Her smile and laugh and sharp-witted responses to the banality of media coming at her. The beauty of her imagination.

I choose The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing because the book changed my life path by giving me permission to write away from the Great White Western Male tradition. With abandon and pleasure and fire. In this book you will find not a traditional plot, but layers of writing and meaning that one must piece together to find the story. You will find how tenuous the line between subjectivity — a real woman's life, body, and mind — and narrative is, which is, whether we admit it or not, the form we give to being and knowing. My words are better because Doris Lessing's came first. She taught me to let the forms my particular life and body travel, speak. Preferably loudly and without flinching. She makes the "lists" that pop up yearly with the "great" authors look, well, puny.

Why it gives me such deep and profound pleasure to give books, and in particular this book, as gifts, is this: "For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature." (Doris Lessing) So here. You're welcome:

"For women like me, integrity isn't chastity, it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven't any control over." –Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

"You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life — the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it." –Doris Lessing